Officials said they dismantled nine organized crime groups and removed more than 27,000 URLs hosting live sports and other copyrighted media during a seven-month operation.

Officials arrested the alleged administrator of First VPN, seized its servers and domains. Europol said the service appeared in almost every major recent cybercrime investigation.

Operation PowerOFF’s latest globally coordinated action identified more than 75,000 alleged cybercriminals. Officials warned each of them to stop jamming up traffic.

The botnet, which compromised routers and IoT devices in 163 countries, claimed about 369,000 victims and $5.8 million from its cybercriminal customers, officials said.

Microsoft, which led the effort, said it seized 330 domains that powered the phishing platform’s core infrastructure. The alleged creator was also named in a civil complaint.

The marketplace was one of the world’s largest hubs for cybercrime with more than 142,000 members. Officials identified and arrested multiple suspects after seizing the site’s database.

Officials said 30 perpetrators have been arrested in the past year, and global law enforcement cooperation is closing the gap.

Oleg Evgenievich Nefedov, a 35-year-old Russian national, is accused of forming and running the ransomware outfit since 2022. He’s now on Europol and Interpol’s most-wanted lists.

The service became a prolific tool for cybercriminals in the past year, as it facilitated thousands of attacks involving credential theft, account takeovers, mass phishing and payment…

The criminal organization specialized in business email compromise scams and generated billions of dollars in criminal proceeds annually from many small-scale operations, officials said.